Did you know the average protestant conservative didn't give a damn about abortion until the early 80s when Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority turned it into a hysterical political issue for the Right? In fact, prior to that, most protestant organizations were perfectly okay with abortion. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a..._from_not.html

Not surprisingly, Louisiana (aka Sportsman's Paradise) leads in gun deaths. It's a surprise that Michigan (4th highest murder rate) isn't even in the top 20.

Try New Orleans as the factor. When you look at the Bible Belt, many of those states are part of higher end of crimes. Of course looking at it closer and you see the urban areas have a huge criminal problem. I guess they are not going to church on Sundays.

Did you know the average protestant conservative didn't give a damn about abortion until the early 80s when Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority turned it into a hysterical political issue for the Right? In fact, prior to that, most protestant organizations were perfectly okay with abortion. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a..._from_not.html

So what you're saying is that Jerry Falwell was Al Gore before Al Gore was Al Gore?

Did you know the average protestant conservative didn't give a damn about abortion until the early 80s when Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority turned it into a hysterical political issue for the Right? In fact, prior to that, most protestant organizations were perfectly okay with abortion. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a..._from_not.html

We used to keep slaves also but I thought liberals were all about being progressive and getting more humane through the years?

Objectives. We examined the relationship between levels of household firearm ownership, as measured directly and by a proxy—the percentage of suicides committed with a firearm—and age-adjusted firearm homicide rates at the state level.

Methods. We conducted a negative binomial regression analysis of panel data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting Systems database on gun ownership and firearm homicide rates across all 50 states during 1981 to 2010. We determined fixed effects for year, accounted for clustering within states with generalized estimating equations, and controlled for potential state-level confounders.

Conclusions. We observed a robust correlation between higher levels of gun ownership and higher firearm homicide rates. Although we could not determine causation, we found that states with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.